This morning Joanne and I were in the upstairs green room. Usually we have so many kids with us that we are in the larger downstairs green room. As much as upstairs is very dignified, there’s usually a lot more action downstairs. I was down there for hair and make up. Rascal Flatts was getting ready. I got to see Peter Krause out of the corner of one eye while getting mascara put on. Love his show Parenthood!

The set seemed strange without my usual ten or twelve kids milling about but since I had a lot of high tech toys we decided to go without kids in the studio. We turned on all the bugs and many of the Hexbug Nanos jumped from their Battle Bridge and ended up on the floor. We had a fun collection of games, bugs, spiders, a motion activated snake, Crayola Color Studio, and an assortment of video cameras include Barbie Video Girl that seemed to really disturb Al! I see his point about the placement of Barbie’s camera (on a necklace–on her chest) but our kid testers really liked using this high tech version of Barbie.

Al taking a look at Barbie Video Camera

At the end we did a demo of the hot new KINECT for XBOX 360 from Microsoft. I was planning on wearing a dress but I was told last night that the sensors might not read my legs in a dress. There’s nothing like having to pick out an outfit where you know the camera is going to shoot you from behind (every woman’s dream). So I decided to go Matrix-y – all in black with the highest heeled boots I own! For the live tease Whitney (from Microsoft PR team) did a demo with me–she did great! And thankfully Tim (my tech hero this morning) was making sure that the KINECT game was up and running. Hard to play a game and talk about it as you’re playing I’ve discovered.

Al Roker and Stephanie Oppenheim playing KINECT

Usually after I do one of these segments I remember all the things I didn’t say. This morning the list includes: I didn’t mention that you need alot of space to play KINECT so it’s not great for really tiny apartments or dorm rooms. You need to be about 8 feet back and you also need room to move side to side (or run the risk of really hitting your opponent!). Als0 – most of the games that have come out for the holiday season are family and action oriented. So if you’re more of a point/shoot XBOX 360 fan, there aren’t titles for you yet…but suspect they’ll be on their way. I love playing Rallyball – it’s like Dodgeball but no one gets hurt! While it’s true that you don’t need to use a controller to play KINECT you will need to know how to use one to set it up initially…(in otherwords, if you’re not comfortable with controllers…you’ll want to get someone who know what they’re doing). The last thing I forgot to mention is that KINECT has facial recognition so that if you make your own Avatar and you turn it on–it will recognize you. How cool is that? Also there is voice recognition as well (also pretty Jetson like if you ask me!). That said…there is a learning curve for selecting games that can seem slow which seems kind of odd since the whole concept is so cutting edge. Ok…now I’ve said it all!